Local anchor Randy Price is the real deal’

Newsman Randy Price has been delivering local news to city dwellers and residents of the surrounding New England area for nearly 25 years.

He arrived in Boston in 1983 to anchor the morning news at WBZ Channel 4. Since then the Louisiana native’s had a decade-plus run at WHDH Channel 7, and now, in a new transition, he has joined the team at WCVB Channel 5, anchoring the morning news with Bianca de la Garza, as well as working on breaking news and major event coverage.

Price will be the featured guest this year in Provincetown’s Carnival parade, on Thursday, Aug. 20, riding in the lead float, a Cape Air-sponsored Pilgrim Monument & Provincetown Museum float.

“Randy Price is the perfect choice, a true Pilgrim,” says Monument director Jim Bakker. “And we are so thankful that Cape Air has chosen to highlight the Pilgrim Monument on their specially designed lead float in the parade to help us publicize the countdown to our 2010 rededication next August.”

Michelle Haynes, marketing and communications director for Cape Air, a former TV news reporter who worked with Price at WBZ and a trustee at the Monument, has been a key facilitator for Price’s visit to Provincetown.

“He’s a great history buff,” says Haynes. And when Cape Air wanted to highlight a non-profit, she and Dan Wolf, Cape Air’s president, decided the Monument would be ideal.

“It is our jewel,” she says, adding that they wanted to heighten awareness about the organization, especially with the Monument’s centennial anniversary coming up.

Price, who lives in Kittery Point, Maine, with his spouse, Mark Steffen, is credited as being the first openly gay newsman in the country. He didn’t really seek that out, though, he says; it came about more just as happenstance.

“There probably were other people who were gay [in TV news at the time], the difference is I was the first person where it was highly publicized.”

He was talking to a reporter who was doing a story for a gay paper in Boston in the early ’90s, and the fact that he was gay just seemed to take off, with national broadcasts picking up on it.

“You know how this goes,” Price says. “I just simply talked about it,” without really thinking about after effects. “It was one of those things that just occurred.”

The reporter happened also to work freelance for one of the cable news companies and had been a reporter for The Patriot Ledger in Quincy. So with those connections, the story had, as they say, “legs.”

The response was generally positive, even from those viewers who had their biases.

“I remember getting letters like: ‘I don’t agree with you but I’ve seen you for a long time, and I like you.’”

Of the outcome, Price says, “I was happy with it. … Not only did it mean a lot to me, it meant a lot to younger [gay] people.”

And, he believes his career has been better for it.

“Ultimately our business is about fairness and truth — we should at least be fair and truthful about our own stories.”

In fact, people still today will approach him to thank him for having come out publicly at that time, he says.

Price has long been active in a variety of charitable causes, including those focused on gay youth, and he often speaks at schools and PFLAG (Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays) events.

He’s had grateful parents come to talk to him after a speech at a high school gay-straight alliance. One mother, he remembers, told him, “You made such a big difference in our family life.” And another time a father of a transgendered boy told him, “Hey, I just wanted to thank you for talking about these issues.”

“I’m thankful that I have these great experiences with people,” he adds.

He’s also an advocate for other causes, including autism, substance abuse, human and civil rights and animal welfare.

His new job at Channel 5 seems a perfect fit — the station has a long-standing history of active commitment to a host of charities. And, after a four-month-long break from the airwaves, Price seems eager to be back at work.

“To go back to work, one, is great. To go back to work here is the gold standard.”

What he likes in particular about his new professional digs is that more people, both young and old, are involved in the news process.

“We have gung-ho young people, we have older news managers.”

In the morning, he says, “There’s still the relevance of the immediacy, we can bring people up to date in a very short amount of time.”

The program is designed so that people don’t have to sit down and watch; rather they can listen to it as they’re getting ready for work in the morning.

“We design the programs [to be conducive to] that.” He adds, “We like it to be warm, we like it to be friendly, we see our role as straightforward and driven to the point.”

One of the last times Price was in Provincetown he came to march in a pride rally for PFLAG.
His commitment to worthy causes is just one of the reasons Cape Air’s Haynes has remained one of Price’s biggest fans. It comes down to the basics, she says. “Randy’s an excellent journalist and he’s truly a nice guy — totally the real deal.”